Group items tagged

"They start by tracking how many times a specific phrase turns up, using a website that tracks memes daily-sort of an early early warning system. Their algorithm then takes that data and analyzes the connections among social and information networks and the influence members have over one another. Their approach works, Colbaugh says, because it's a blend of social science (the power people have to influence others) and computer science (the power of Big Data)."

"One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market," he told a conference in Abu Dhabi. "And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."

""We know where Nick's going, we know what Nick looks like," Urch explains, "now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future"

It occurred to me earlier that LA is a little like The Machine from the the TV series, Person of Interest ... this article has reinforced my view! LA is like a more benign machine: watching learners, analyzing what they're up to, what they might be struggling with, and perhaps able to offer some coaching or guidance to the learner. Like The Machine, LA has significant privacy considerations relating to the monitoring of users and the collection and storage of data relating to their activities. #LAK13

"The companies that figure out how to generate intelligence from that data will know more about us than we know ourselves, and will be able to craft techniques that push us toward where they want us to go, rather than where we would go by ourselves if left to our own devices. "